“She was counting on the Manet,” Celine said. “It was supposed to be her insurance policy.”
“Meaning what?” Julia asked. “The Manet that was stolen was . . .?”
“A forgery. That may have been the reason it was taken.”
Julia inhaled audibly. “The Manet never did fit. In the eighty-one minutes the thieves spent in the Gardner Museum, there’s no sign of them entering the Blue Room. There’s no evidence of the motion sensors being doctored, so that’s reliable evidence.”
“The portrait of his mother was out to a restorer’s, wasn’t it?”
When Julia confirmed that, Celine went on: “I think I recall Penny saying the Chez Tortoni was due for a cleaning as well. I’m guessing whoever replaced the original was afraid the change would be discovered.”
The silence stretched out for several minutes as both women pondered the consequences of this possibility. Had the entire theft been orchestrated to conceal the truth about the Chez Tortoni?
Click Here for a Longer Excerpt
That’s an excerpt from Bearer of Secrets, the third book in the Celine Skye series. If you’re new to the series, Celine Skye is a psychic art sleuth. Her focus: the thirteen works stolen in the infamous Gardner Museum theft in 1990.
But Julia’s information about the Blue Room isn’t pure fiction.
This is a question that’s long stumped investigators: Who took the Gardner Museum’s Manet?
The 10 in. x 13 in. painting showing a man in a top hat sat on top of a Venetian side table in the Blue Room—directly beneath Manet’s more famous work, a portrait of his mother, Madame Auguste Manet.
But although there’s security footage showing two men disguised as cops being let into the museum on the spring morning in 1990 when the theft took place and motion sensors tell the precise story of which rooms they visited, there’s no record of the thieves entering the Blue Room.
The thieves spent 81 minutes in the museum and investigators know exactly where they went. The museum’s motion detectors were working just fine, and were in fact tested after the theft. No amount of crawling or tiptoeing around the sensors succeeded in fooling the equipment.
So how had the thieves managed it?
Even more intriguing: when investigators arrived hours after the theft took place, they found the work’s 17th-century French gilt frame lying discarded on the security director’s chair.
Why had they taken the work out of the painting to begin with? It was small enough to be carried with the frame. Why leave the empty frame on the security director’s chair? Investigators suspected a personal dig at the security director, a comment on the museum’s lax security, which had invited criticism from even the students working as night guards.
When I first began to concoct a theory for the theft for my Celine Skye Art Heist series, I’ll have to confess I wasn’t entirely sure what to do with this particular fact.
It pointed to extensive insider involvement, but what else did it mean?
I’m delighted to tell you that in Bearer of Secrets, the third novel in the Celine Skye series, psychic art sleuth Celine and her FBI friends Blake Markham and Julia Hood do figure out this conundrum. (Click here for a longer excerpt.)
With some help from Museum Director, Penny Hoskins, they know who took Manet’s Chez Tortoni, when it was taken, and why. Celine even knows where it went after the theft.
Bearer of Secrets will be out soon. I hope you enjoy finding out more about the curious case of the stolen Manet and the empty picture frame. Celine and her friends are getting closer to the truth about what happened that night.
Click Here to Read a 3-Chapter Excerpt
Bearer of Secrets, Celine Skye, excerpt, Gardner Theft